The present invention relates to a method of generating a simulation model to conduct simulation of phenomena and events occurring in, for example, the economic and social environments by representing the phenomena and the events in terms of causality.
For a company to achieve better and advantageous decision making as compared with competing companies, it is essential to construct a decision making support system in which appropriate information items are gathered at an early stage to prepare an appropriate strategic step prior to the other companies. For this purpose, a simulation to predict the future will be efficiently utilized. There exists two types of simulations, that is, simulations of discrete type in which the simulation is conducted by handling events and simulations of continuous type in which values of variables continuously change on the time axis or with respect to time. For example, Akira Uchiyama, “Visualization of Economic Trend after Bubble Economy by SD”, JSD Conference, Oct. 23, 2004 describes that the simulation of continuous type in which feedback loops of chains and microscopic events can be dispensed with is efficiently used in the chain prediction of causality in the political decision making or in the chain prediction of causality, for example, to determine how a price of new products exerts influences when the new products are put to the market. Also, according to the article, the system dynamics technique is generally suitable as a simulator of continuous type for a system including causality in social phenomena taking place in the world. The system dynamics technique is proposed and developed by Forester at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is a method of simulating transient phenomena by describing phenomena in the form of difference equations. According to the system dynamics, a model is configured by combining two kinds of symbols (variables), namely, a rate indicating a flow rate of a substance and a level indicating accumulation of the substance.
In a simulation model generation method of system dynamics, a model is constructed by setting relationships between rates and levels by use of a text-type programming technique called Dynamo and visual screen images such as those used in an associated tool available in the market.
In the simulation model generation of the system dynamics, it is quite important to determine which one of the rate and the level is adopted for the object of which a model is to be generated. However, for invisible factors such as social phenomena which are difficult to visually recognized, there does not exist any index or guidance for how to generate a model by use of rates and levels. Therefore, until the user has a sufficient deal of experience in the simulation model generation, it is required for the user to construct the simulation model in the try and error method. This requires a large amount of human power and time.